Studio Laika animators unveil secrets behind “The Boxtrolls” creation

Studio Laika animators unveil secrets behind “The Boxtrolls” creation

PanARMENIAN.Net - When this season's Annie Award nominations for animation were announced, it was The Boxtrolls -- the latest stop-motion animated feature from Portland, Ore.-based studio Laika and distributor Focus Features -- that earned the most, 13 including best animated feature, Carolyn Giardina said in an article published at The Hollywood Reporter.

The announcement has helped to turn a spotlight on Laika's lovingly-crafted third feature, an adaptation of Alan Snow’s fantasy adventure novel Here Be Monsters, which pushed the boundaries of the century-old stop-motion process of moving puppets, frame by frame. Set in the Victorian-era, The Boxtrolls — with a voice cast including Sir Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Toni Collette and Tracy Morgan — follows an orphan boy who goes by the name of Eggs and was raised by the thought-to-be-dangerous Boxtrolls who live beneath the village of Cheesebridge.

Laika CEO Travis Knight — who was a producer and lead animator on the film — said the aim was to explore what defines a family. “Whether it's a nuclear family or surrogate family, the thing that unites a family is love and commitment to each other and a desire to look after someone’s well being, even at a personal expense,” he said, noting that additional themes include class structure and bigotry. “Bigotry thrives in darkness, and showcasing that people aren’t scary because they are different … we think that’s important to explore more broadly.”

The studio created a style all its own with a "hybrid" production process that combined stop-motion with the latest digital techniques, involving use of a 3D printer and motion capture, as well as elements of hand-drawn animation. This process of blending techniques started with Laika’s first two films, Coraline and ParaNorman (both of which received Oscar nominations). “We had some bumps [on the earlier films], but The Boxtrolls is where we refined the process,” says co-visual effects supervisor Steve Emerson.

The scale of the work on The Boxtrolls exceeds Laika’s prior films. It includes 190 puppets, 200 costumes, 70 sets and 20,000 props — all handmade using materials ranging from fabric to plywood, foam and cotton balls. Artists again used a color 3D printer to created individual parts of faces (for instance, difference positions for a month or eyebrow, so that when pieced together in different combinations, animators can produce a range of facial expressions. This film involved 3D printing no less than 53,000 individual face parts.

Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright) had roughly 1.4 million possible expressions, and the villain Archibald Snatcher (Kingsley) had nearly 1.18 million. “We wanted them to be realistic in their movement,” said director of rapid prototyping Brian McLean. “This really adds to the story but would have been prohibitive a few years ago.”

Arguably the most complex stop-motion sequence ever created, The Boxtrolls includes one during which about a dozen couples waltz across the dance floor at a ball, and Snatcher tries to capture Eggs as they duck and weave among the dancers.

“It took all 18 months of the animation schedule to produce a little less than two minutes of footage for the dance sequence," said Anthony Stacchi (co-director of Sony Pictures Animation’s Open Season), who co-directed the film with first-time helmer Graham Annable (storyboard artist on Coraline and ParaNorman). “We innocently added that to the story and we didn't realize how difficult it would be,” he commented, saying that everyone in the production meeting when silent when the sequence was first suggested.

As with all scenes, it started with storyboarding, and then Laika brought in choreographers and a team of dancers. They reproduced the waltz and it was motion captured and filmed for reference.

The schedule and complexity of the sequence would have made it effectively impossible to achieve entirely with stop motion. In the end, they created Snatcher, Eggs and three lead couples using in stop motion. Additionally, anything that comes into contact with the lead characters, such as the fabric from the ball gowns, involved stop motion.

All of the costumes for the ball had to be designed and handmade for the puppets, an effort led by costume designer Deborah Cook. Meanwhile Georgina Hayns, creative supervisor of puppet fabrication, explained that to allow Eggs or Snatcher to lift the skirts of the ball gowns, they had to create special rigs to move the fabric on the stop-motion set.

The background dancers were computer animated by hand (meaning without using the motion capture data) and had to be matched and composited into the stop-motion shots during postproduction.

The film of course also involved close work with the voice actors. Stacchi praised the cast, and described Kingsley's particularly unique method for creating Snatcher. “He saw the character design and wanted his voice to come out of that big belly,” the director said. “For the first recording session he said he wanted to recline in his chair to allow his voice 'to come out of my belly.’ That’s the opposite of how you want to record anyone because they will be constricted."

Stacchi confided, “He told me later that there was someone in his life that he based the character on, but would never tell me who it was. He never wanted the person to find out.”

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